Monday, March 14, 2016

A 10 second Interview

Area: Kansas City, Missouri(Fleming Park Ward)Companion: Elder Monroe

Hello everyone!

This week was wonderful! It was full of service, meetings, and some fun events. We also were able to have an experience that may not every happen again in my lifetime. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit.

This past Monday a great service opportunity came up! I was really excited to help this guy out. When we got to his house he had just gotten some new baffles for his Victory Motorcycle. I absolutely love this guys bike as it looks amazing and sounds amazing! It is about a $15,000 bobber bike that has this sweet vintage white paint job that looks so good! Come to find out he had no idea how to change out his new baffles, so I offered to help him try and figure it out. Well, it wasn't hard at all and we were able to get them changed out in about an hour or so! We also took out his converters that are built in there for emissions purposes but Missouri doesn't have emissions so we took them out to make his bike sound a lot louder as well. His new baffles were just about wide open enough to stick a soda can down. The bike sounded so sweet afterward. He said that since I had done most of the work that he just had to let me ride it... I wanted to so bad! But with mission rules we are not allowed to, so I didn't. But he did say that if I was ever back in the area after my mission that he would let me ride it to my hearts content! The Lord definitely placed that tender mercy in my path as I haven't been able to work on a bike for over a year and a half!

We also had Mission Leadership Conference this past week. It was really great and there was a lot of information to pass along to our zone in zone training this week. Zone training went well, not as well as we would have liked but they are getting progressively better than they have been. There just isn't very much participation on the missionaries side sometimes and it just ends up feeling like a lecture rather than a training/discussion.

I was laughing pretty hard at that story that you shared with me about the bishop! I really liked that one and may have even slipped that story into my email to the mission president this week...

So, now to the meat of this week! We were able to have Elder Gary E. Stephenson of the 12, Elder Wilford W. Anderson of the 70, and Elder Donald D. Deschler our area 70 come and visit with us for a few hours this past Saturday! When they first arrived you could just feel their presence in the building. He requested to shake each one of our hands and how cool was that! It was just such a cool experience to be able to look into the eyes of a special witness of the Lord and get to speak with him for a few brief seconds. After he finished shaking our hands, he commented how much he enjoys having 10 second interviews with all the missionaries he meets. He said that by shaking our hands that he had an interview with our soul as he gazed into each one of our eyes... That blew my mind! How cool is that?! There was some great things shared in the conference, but I wanted to share with you some of the things that helped me the most.

With anything that we learn in life there are three ways to learn them. We can either learn them with just head knowledge. Head knowledge is just with our mind, it make logical sense, we understand the reasoning behind it. This is very important, but also can be very harmful if only head knowledge is present. Next, heart knowledge. This is what creates a true desire. A want to learn more and internalize it. This leads us to questions and a desire to want to do more. Last, we have soul knowledge. This is the most important part! This is where we take action. We understand, we have a desire, and now we take the next step in taking action to do so. This is where we practice! "Faith without works is dead."

Those were the main things that I wanted to share with you today. The apostles truly are called of God! Figure out what aspects of the gospel have yet to reach the should knowledge and work on one of those things this week. :).